


Heroism on Command

by PerfidiousFate



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Salarians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 12:49:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4787801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfidiousFate/pseuds/PerfidiousFate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kirrahe thinks about his homeworld and not being a hero.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heroism on Command

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yaseanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yaseanne/gifts).



> Kirrahe was a fun character to try and write, BAMF that he is. Thank you for the prompt! I got to think more about salarian culture in general, and Kirrahe in particular. The story turned out more introspective than anything, but I hope you enjoy it anyway! <3

Kirrahe was getting too old for this shit.

That wasn’t something he actually thought. Kirrahe enjoyed being part of the STG. Liked risking his life in order to save others. Liked his soldiers. Liked holding the line in the face of overwhelming odds, making a real difference.

Like now, when he was the last one left and had to learn to disarm a bomb very, very quickly. It was a bunch of krogan extremists, angry and disillusioned about the genophage, and willing to use that anger to wreak havoc onto others. They were on Mannovai, the second salarian colony, all graceful arches and mountainous pathways. Good place for bandits to hole up. Kirrahe and his unit were dispatched to deal with it. Unfortunately, the krogan were too angry to leave their bomb to chance, and had decided to hole up around it and shoot anyone who came close.

His men were too good for that. They were distracting the krogan – even now, Kirrahe could hear the sounds of battle, gunfire and screaming and the occasional krogan charge. Excellent. His team did good work. But that did leave him with a bomb, about three minutes before it was set to go off, and several years of bomb defusing training he didn’t have.

He really was getting too old for this shit.

Still a thought he didn’t actually have. But the thought was a cliché he’d heard hundreds of times. Blasto in particular enjoyed using it in particular strenuous situations. Kirrahe wasn’t a fan of Blasto – too spectacular, too fake. Nothing like real battle. Nothing like sacrifice and the greater good and the rush of adrenaline that hits when you’re inches away from death. Blasto probably could’ve defused the bomb within ten seconds of it going off, gotten an attractive female to kiss him in gratitude, and then defeated the villain within the next ten to fifteen minutes.

This was real life. No real villains – just a few angry, upset krogan. Very few attractive females, and certainly none that would kiss Kirrahe. None that he’d care to kiss him, given the salarian non-hormone based reproductive cycle.

Oh, well. It was up to him to hold the line yet again. Kirrahe sighed, grabbed his omnitool and set to defusing.

He managed to get it four seconds from blast-off.

* * *

Kirrahe was pegged for the military early on in his life, when he was still in school.

They did tests when they were still young, to try and assess their capabilities. Kirrahe’s clan wanted him to be a scientist, but he didn’t have the head for that. It was okay. They were happy when he joined the military, and happier still when he became part of the STG. His clan threw him a party. It was last time he saw most of them in person; too much work to do otherwise. Sometimes he saw one of his brothers on the homeworld, but those times were rare and few between.

His fellow salarians tended to think in bursts and circles, dizzy dizzy with the buzz buzz buzz of their thoughts. Not Kirrahe. He was intelligent, he knew that – didn’t become a Major of the STG without knowing your way around both an omnitool and a Council meeting – but he was a military man, through and through, and he liked thinking in lines and spirals rather than confetti. Saved lives that way. Better to follow the string of your thought to its conclusion rather than jump around like a scientist would.

Perhaps that was why he found Sur’Kesh unnerving at times. It was comforting, yes – the world he grew up on – but it was strange at the same time. He had travelled the galaxy and seen the world, seen endless desolate plains and mountains reaching up to distant suns, seen planets so cold your breath froze in milliseconds and fell to the ground to add to the layer of snow and ice. Chaos. Unbridled, natural, chaos.

Not like Sur’Kesh, which planned its chaos and its buildings and its jungles the same as anyone else did. Strange. Comforting. Strange.

In the end, it was what he fought for. That peaceful, strange beauty. Worth preserving. All the people, their history, their culture…Kirrahe would protect it all, come hell or high water. It was what he fought for.

* * *

Salarians treated their heroes with all due respect, the same as any galactic race. Most of their history has been faded by the annals of time – so many thousands of years in their archives, it was hard to keep track – but the important names stick. The leaders, the geniuses, those who changed society.

Not so much for the Special Tasks Group heroes. Their legends pass along the STG members, by whispers and oblique mentions, as much shadows in death as they were in life. Silent Step and Ever Alert, Death from Shadow and Secret Keeper – all those and more were the names recruits repeated like a mantra to themselves and their fellows, what they dreamed of becoming.

Kirrahe, who remembered being a bright-eyed recruit, understood the value of the legends. But he also understood what those recruits did not, not just yet – how a name whispered down the ranks of the STG was not the same as a statue built in the middle of Sur’Kesh, and how even the whisper was much more than what most of them got. Most of them were forgotten immediately, shadows that they were.

Kirrahe didn’t mind that. It wasn’t glory he was after.

* * *

Commander Shepard was a living legend, and he knew it since he first met her. Not because of any notion of romance or sparks or someone’s pure and good soul being immediately evident to all those who gazes upon them, but because she took down a breeding facility, saved a bunch of people, lost some others, and all without losing her cool. She listened to Kirrahe, too, and some humans didn’t do that. Some humans didn’t listen to other humans, too. It was a very galactic trait, that.

Nevertheless, she was a good person, the kind that came by so rarely, and she was an exemplary commander and an excellent soldier. The combination of these things was the stuff legends were made of.

So Kirrahe was pleased when he got his most recent assignment.

It was an honour to fight with her again. And an honour that she remembered him well, respected him right back.

STG members did not get their assignments easily. There was too much sensitive information there for it to fall into enemy hands, and by nature salarians enjoyed over-complication. And STG were the best of the best. So Kirrahe got his assignments same as the other officers, through a triple-encrypted message on a secure channel, with the message itself being replete with salarian military code words.

Sometimes, Kirrahe wondered how turians managed to be the best military in the galaxy. Their security was laughably easy compared to the salarians'. Then again, salarian technology put the entire galaxy to shame. Another thing to be proud of for their species.

Either way, getting his assignment - and crafting an affirmative reply to his commanding officer so that he knew that the message was delivered successfully - always took an hour at least. Kirrahe didn't mind it; he always got his assignments after a mission, anyway, and it was nice to do some good old-fashioned decryption to try and calm his nerves.

And it made getting his assignment so much the better. Like this one, where there had been Cerberus operatives found on Sur'Kesh doing strange experiments, and Spectre Shepard was dispatched to deal with the problem along with Kirrahe. Excellent.

Shepard showed up as she always did: in the nick of time. With her came the turian, Garrus, who eyed Kirrahe's gun longingly - as he'd taken to doing, somewhat unnervingly - and the asari. Liara. The STG had a lot to say about Dr. Liara T'Soni recently, and Kirrahe couldn't help but look her over consideringly. But she only smiled wanly at him. No indication of whether or not she really was as important as the frequent missives and whispered rumors claimed. Oh, well. Not Kirrahe's division.

"Commander Shepard," he said instead. "Excellent to work with you again."

Shepard smiled, and nodded. She looked the same as when he'd last her. To be fair, humans aged slowly compared to salarians - much quicker than asari, and more noticeably than turians, but quicker nonetheless. But he suspected it was Shepard herself, too, who while human seemed a bit more so at the same time. A hero. An honor. A legend.

“Good to see you again, Major,” she said, and then, “What’s the situation?”

And so they were off.

* * *

It was strange, being on Sur’Kesh again. Kirrahe grew up there, like so many of their kind did – he’d grown up among the plastic houses hidden amongst the jungle, the creepers draped across the ground, waterfalls running through the world – but he’d spent so long traveling across the galaxy that the familiarity of it all threw him, a little bit. He was so used to strange, alien vistas, getting used to life in a new environment, encountering hostile wildlife or struggling to survive in an atmosphere not perfectly calibrated to growth and survival. The lack of anything similar, of just comfort and calculatedly idyllic scenery, was unnerving.

Perhaps he should visit his clan sometime, visit old friends. But he wouldn’t have time, with the mission. Kirrahe valued the mission too much. Perhaps there was something strange about that – fighting to protect the homeworld, his clan, his people, without having time to actually see them – but he pushed the thought aside.

The mission itself was a success. Of course it was. Kirrahe’s soldiers performed admirably – Shepard took the lead and slammed Cerberus soldiers with biotic charges left and right. Kirrahe blew up a few, and Garrus grumbled about doing the same if _he_ had a gun like that. Liara’s biotics picked off more soldiers than could be seen.

The facility itself was full of strange experiments. Terrible. Evil. He’d have to write a long report about it, about all the salarians Husks, and he shuddered. But the blew it up, him and Shepard. It wouldn’t trouble anyone any more.

He was getting too old for this shit, he thought fleetingly again, before squashing the thought. No, he wasn’t. Too much left to do to get old. Lives to save. Galaxy to guard. No squandering his remaining good years – he had a mission to carry out.

Kirrahe pointed his gun and blew up a few more soldiers. Maybe not a movie hero, or a hero at all, but it was good enough for him.

 


End file.
